


Five Movement Symphonies.

by Aproclivity



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: And he plays the violin, F/M, Music as a love language, Strand is a composer, Strand's gotta Strand in whatever form it is, alex is his muse, and sometimes it's just a plain language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 21:09:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28695222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aproclivity/pseuds/Aproclivity
Summary: After a particularly vicious fight and a surprise discovery, Alex unexpectedly returns to Howard's house and finds Strand surrounded by music that he's composed, music that Alex has inspired. It's a symphony that is about his feelings for Alex but the fifth movement is unfinished. So, Strand picks up his violin and plays the fifth for her.
Relationships: Alex Reagan/Richard Strand
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	Five Movement Symphonies.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [remembertowrite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/remembertowrite/gifts).



> Happy Holidays fic exchange, Jess! I hope you enjoy this! As always, this fic comes along with a playlist and a moodboard that can be found on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4EKOLrI3SH3h4PXTWkOcxw). Thanks for being awesome and doing all you do!

While it may have been late to some people (Alex had given up on calling people ‘normal’ after the tenth? Hundrenth? Time that Richard had informed her that ‘normal’ was a social complex and lectures that she listened to just for the sound of his voice. That was a problem, it was always a problem honestly.) it definitely wasn’t late for the two of them. Neither of them could call sleep a friend, especially considering how many times they’d sat on Richard’s sofa until three am until they were even tired and besides it wasn’t _that_ late. Midnight was practically five pm for them, and this was important. After the way that they had argued this after noon, normally would be walking on tip toes around him for the next few days. But the train of this had the weight of history behind it and they didn’t have the luxury to be how they had been. The things that they were doing were coming to a head and Alex could feel it in a gut that hasn’t steered her wrong yet. 

So Alex didn’t think that she’d be a bother as she drove across a city that was eerily silent and turned up the radio, softly singing along to the song with it. Three years ago the melody would have been unfamiliar and the words unintelligible, but that is what Richard insisted on, and it was a concession that she made in order to be allowed to drive. Well, that and her ignoring the way that his fingers grappled are the door handle until they turned to pale bone when Alex drove too fast for his liking. 

It was always too fast for Richard’s liking. He drove in a way that would make grandmothers tell him to hurry his ass up. 

It was 12:15 when Alex pulled into the familiar driveway, tucking her Subaru behind his BMW as she always did. Richard’s driveway wasn’t short, and when she got past the line of trees and fencing Alex could see that all of the artificially sunny yellow lighting slipped past the shades and through the sheer curtains invitingly. Really, Alex was going to need to commend Ruby, _again_ for how well her miraculous revisions had gone. Through the sheer will and force of Richard’s assistant, Howard’s old Victorian had become less ‘my father’s house’ and more Richard’s home. Her scrubbing had done more than just remove twenty years of grime and decay, in some ways it had exorcised ghosts that had been captured in wallpaper and blended into popcorn ceiling paint. 

Once the house had been as formidable as the man who lived inside of its walls but now Alex felt welcome in one if not the other. Inhaling the scent of the blue and purple hydrangeas that Alex had helped to plant (she was, perhaps somewhat surprisingly excellent in the garden and dealing with plants. They always seemed to want to bloom for her rather than the first set that Richard had planted that had grown wild before it withered and died leaving nothing but weeds and brown in its wake) she felt surprisingly grounded as she almost ran up the steps to knock on his door. 

She could have just _gone in_ , after all Richard had given Alex a key _years_ ago but this was midnight and it was late. Alex did try to give him some privacy after all. 

After he glanced through the thin windows that were placed on either side of the replica door, Alex can see him sigh as he opens the door for her. What he’s wearing isn’t unfamiliar to her; they had at least grown out of the need to be professional on nights that they’d worked together. Alex often wore leggings with sweaters over them and Richard wore pajama pants and a variation of an old Yale shirt like he did now. While Richard may have opened the door to her, he didn’t exactly offer her entry to his house. Instead he stepped into the vacancy that had happened when the door opened and leaned his elbow against the door jam. So many times over the years, Alex has come to know the unwritten language of Richard Strand. There was the obvious catalogue of sighs and huffy laughs and the wry smile he made sometimes and the angry way he crossed his arms when Warren came up (even before they’d had his proper name) of course but there was more to it as well. There were the long silences and the rapid spitting of his words in anger and there was the way that his eyes could hold emotions like no one else that she had ever seen. 

Even if she was the only one to see them. Sometimes Alex thought that she was. Most people called her _too_ expressive, in both her voice and face, and Strand not expressive enough in either but they didn’t know him. Sometimes they didn’t know him at all. 

Right now, that unspoken Richard Strand language was speaking volumes to her all at once. No, it wasn’t speaking, it was shouting with the raised brow and the tension in the line of his mouth and the way that there was the slight twist of the muscles below his chiseled cheekbone. He was quite clearly saying to her, with an anger that had matched their fight earlier that had been captured by her recorder. _What the hell are you doing here, Alex? Didn’t you say enough earlier? How many times do I need to bring up my wife before you retreat back behind your hurt professionalism? Why can’t you just take a hint?_

Alex breathes slowly, in and out. Richard breathes slowly in and out. In this battle of an immovable object and an unstoppable force, neither of them want to give the inch that will inevitably lead to a mile between them. Of course the destination of that mile varied: one step closer, three steps back and a bridge over the canyon that his resentment and anger always carved. 

There were also the things that neither of them admitted to: the glances between them when someone (Nic) was talking to them, the way Alex bit her lip when she was trying very hard not to laugh at whatever was being spoken too. It was her professional journalism voice, she’d told Richard once when watching the tapes had turned into overly filled glasses of bourbon so neither of them would need to get up. Wanting to be close to one another was a dialect all of its own, with the intricacies and the quirks of generations. A generation where they’d been on the same team, coated with flirting and his disbelief and her wanting him to believe in her. Another generation where the two of them were at odd: biting shifts of spat words and enclosed posture, yelling across cliffs and gullies with words that were only misconstrued. Then finally, the two of them had landed here in the variation on the theme of the first generation of the communication of Alex and Richard: flirting, yes but of a deeper sort. Fighting yes, but with the intention of closing gaps between them rather than ripping into their skin to find more. And finally the understanding of learning each other’s new slang and shortcut. 

And of course, the way that they caught the other when they weren’t looking, which led to the barbed wire of his voice when it carved out ‘wife’ and the softness when he offered to cook for her or to give her a drink. With Alex it was teasing, and gentle touches that hadn’t been there before. Once, Alex wouldn’t have touched Strand for anything no matter how tactile she was. Do not touch me had radiated from in waves of sharpened static, and Alex understood that. But since the night of Coralee, Alex had braved the song of them and had placed her hand over his. That was what the touches were now: small moves of reassurance, comfort being offered when Alex knew that he wouldn’t have ever accepted it otherwise and the casual way she touched him when she moved behind or around him. 

Richard for his part, just tried a hard reset to how he had been before, forming intricate boards of coincidence and crimson thread connecting them, forcing Alex to see the bigger picture of their relationship, but also the minute details that only Richard Strand would expect of her to dig through the truth of them below. 

But if Richard was going to expect Alex to read the thread between those lines, then she was going to use her voice. Well, not just her voice, Alex knows that Richard can read her as well and quickly as he can dissect an article in a journal. She knows that when she looks at him, he can see the almost-sort of-kinda apology along with the urgency that matched in the cool tones of her words: “Look, I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important, alright?” 

They stare at one another, a stalemate where neither one of them speak in any language before Richard allows her to erode some of the walls of his immovable object with her force. He sighs: loudly and directly and gives her a _this better be good_ look before he steps back, Richard’s hand still against the door jam, but he lets her in as Alex dips between his arm. 

“I know you said that Gluska has played its part in all of this and I didn’t need to go looking for it anymore. But I kept digging…” Without even thinking about it, Alex follows the familiar path to the dining room where they so often spread their work out around them with all of the ease of Red Riding Hood going to visit her grandmother. 

That was, of course until Richard Strand assumes the role of the Big Bad Wolf and steps directly into it. “I think we should work in the office tonight.” Using his professor who will not accept know for an answer is something that Richard does with an alarming regularity, even now.

And given all things being equal, Alex responds to it as she always does: step it around him as she explained. “I need room to spread this out okay?” _Because someone is going to stay home sulking in his office for a few days rather than coming into mine_! Goes unspoken, but Alex knows that Richard heard it loud and clear. 

The gleaming hardwood of the reclaimed table is normally largely clear for the most part, save for when Alex destroys the tidiness of his neat and orderly piles. Tonight though, it’s spread with a sprawl of papers, and when Alex looks at them like Alice peers into the Rabbit’s hole, she can see that they’re musical composition papers. And they’re not blank—instead each of them is a language that is unfamiliar to Alex as cruniform is. But while the notes on them are incomprehensible to her, the scrawled titles on the top, scratched by Richard’s hand are not. 

There’s her name. Her name again and again and other things that are associated with Alex. As the normally meticulous Richard hastily throws the paper into a pile with both of his arms, Alex can still see the way that her name slips and vanishes between the next one and the next. 

_Eleven Calls, Alex One, The Cabin, The Sleepnote, A Crimson Sweater, Requiem for Ash and Water, Alex Movement Two, Soft Breathing and Cotton Blankets, Safe in the Dark._

The titles went on and on, and Alex just blinked at them before she took a reflexive step backwards. “What—what _is_ all of this?” Her voice is little and she hated the hint of fear in it. 

Richard hates it too, and she watches him flinch as the debate rages through him. “I’m a composer. It’s. It’s just music I composed in order to relieve stress.” They both know the implications for that: Scriabin and Black and the Axis Mundae as it was first: the studio. 

She doesn’t speak. He doesn’t speak as Richard holds the music protectively to his chest. Looking around for more, a key, a clue, anything that might explain what is happening here, Alex finds one in the form of an older, well kept and gleaming violin. “Wait.” Alex says quickly, her tone returning to normalcy for asking questions. “You play the violin?”

Richard is as monosyllabic as always when he says, “yes.” But the hesitancy is written into the word, his wariness. 

“And you’ve been composing songs or scores or whatever kind of music this is?”

Another “yes,” though this one comes with the look he gives Alex when he knows she’s playing dumb for some reason and searching for the answer when she knows it already. 

“About me.” It’s said flatly almost as if Alex can’t believe the idea of it. 

“Alex,” her name is a sigh on his lips and resignation is etched into his back and shoulders as he puts the papers on the table with far more delicacy than Richard had used to pick them up. 

“Why? I don’t understand.” But she’s starting to and she knows it, it’s too close to the edge that they’d been traveling since he’d gotten back from Italy and Alex had returned from Turkey.”

There’s a long pause, and he looks at her with the sigh in every single part of him. “Alex.” He breathes her name, sighs it over his tongue and she knows what Richard is saying is, _please don’t make me say it. I can’t say it. You know what happens if I do_. 

Alex does know. So what she does instead is more simple than that conversation. “Play something for me.”

“Alex.”

“No. They’re about me, at least some of them and I deserve to know what they are.” _If you don’t say it then I deserve it another way_. “Pick one, _any_ one. Play it for me. There’s no recorder here, Richard. It’s just me and you.

He sighs, both verbally and not as he picks up the violin and bow, tucking the wood in beneath his chin. With the first tender note, his eyes lashes flutter closed but then they snap open as if Richard remembers that Alex is still here in the room. Alex never would have expected his playing to falter, but just for a moment it does before he locks his eyes with her own. 

The melody is deceptively simple, soft and light and tender. It almost seems like a lullaby written in a melonalic fashion. It’s minor notes played softly, sweetly even and Richard’s body moves with the bow, the instrument allow his body to relax in a way that Alex has only ever seen before when Richard was tired or tipsy, letting the steel in his spine go molten and fluid enough for him to match the mere mortals around him. 

Yearning echos softly through the notes, tentative with the smallest bit of hope only to be crashed against with a wave of recriminations and bitterness. But then the sweet pining hope comes again, relentless in the way that it refuses to yield against the louder major notes. Again it tries to drown out the slow small bit of hope, but it can’t entirely. It’s too bright among the dark and sober tones, too persistent. Louder, harsher, angrier notes echo with bitterness and strife, but the yearning and hope is born again and again, refusing to be silenced or altered. 

By the middle of the piece, Alex’s eyes are wet, by the end the tears shine eerily wet against her cheeks. With her entire body still, Alex just holds her breath waiting for the final note, waiting to see which one wins the battle. In the end it’s hope that wins. Applause comes in the form of a sob as she sinks gently into a chair. 

The only thing Richard’s voice says is: “Safe in the Dark: Alex Movement Four.” But Alex can see it in him even through the sheen of her tears. He’s waiting for a response just as much as she was, and the tension and yearning and want are all there inside of it. 

“What’s the fifth movement called?” Because of course there was a fifth movement. There couldn’t not be a fifth movement considering it’s them and all of the things surrounding them. 

“I um.” Richard clears his throat and looks away from her. “I haven’t written it yet. I thought I had many times but in the end it’s never the proper ending for it.”

“If you know it’s not the proper ending,” Alex speaks softly and gently. “Then you must have an idea how it ends.”

“Alex,” his voice is equally soft, a gentle plea composed entirely of the prayer of her name. 

“Richard,” her tone drops a little more, a shadow in the darkness, offering him a choice in it, Alex’s heart cradled between her hands and extending towards him. 

Without saying anything, Richard just slowly raises the violin from his side to his chin again, all the wariness of a wild animal with a thorn in his paw. As they have so often, Richard’s eyes seek Alex’s and lock with them, just like they had in his office the first time when he’d offered the first flirty barb. The tender music that comes is a question, surrounded by the hope form before and Alex is fairly sure those hopeful notes are her theme. 

There’s a sadness in them, those darker notes, hope slowly attempting to eclipse them. Harshness, darkness, a sound of something demon but above all else hope. A single question swirls through it, brushing in when it’s least expected like a breath, like a gasp caught between tears and a sob. It combines with the hopeful sound and it rings out around it’s echoes coming back to Alex like a gentle caress. It’s there in her face, it’s sliding through her hair, it’s resting against her hip and parting her lips but then it stops as Richard’s voice breathes out instead, as he lowers the violin and bow to his sides once more, the sense of hopeless is there and Alex can almost see it, among the resignation and failure. 

“You’re the only one who can decide the ending. I only ever get so far.” Alex knows. Alex knows that each of them is so desperate to give the decision to the other, cycling through it from puddle to storm. If the choice isn’t made now, then neither of them will make it and Alex knows that too. Not making a choice is one, especially at the end of the world. 

So it’s Alex, as it always is who leaps without looking, who breaks the wall between them and she wraps her arms carefully around the neck, and she presses her lips to his. Richard moves her back towards the table so he can put his violin down and hold her properly. Whatever was so important doesn’t matter in the hiatus they can make of one night. 

For the first time in a long time, Alex sleeps and what brings her into the waking world isn’t a nightmare or a demon. Instead, it’s the distant notes of a violin playing a song that has actual joy in it—Alex knows it for what it is: the ending of a symphony and the promise of a new one.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are love.


End file.
